The Essays of Leonard Michaels [Hardcover]

Leonard Michaels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 2009

NONFICTION FROM “ONE OF THE STRONGEST AND MOST ARRESTING PROSE TALENTS OF HIS GENERATION” (LARRY MCMURTRY)

Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and ’60s—and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the ’70s and ’80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels’s highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he’s asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word “relationship,” or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page.

The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These essays, spare and elegant as Michaels alights on a range of subjects, follow the late writer's own precept: I think we name ourselves, more or less, whenever we write, and thus tend always to write about ourselves. This pungent collection, by a quizzical New York Jew who never quite assimilated, divides into two sections: critical essays and autobiographical essays. Many of these works first appeared in the Threepenny Review, among other publications. The first part includes a brilliant essay On Love and another on Having Trouble with My Relationship. The latter breezily covers figures as diverse as Pope, Larkin, Heidegger and Kafka. Other figures and subjects blowing through these pages include Bellow, Nabokov, Kubrick, Edward Hopper, Wallace Stevens Rita Hayworth, and how to watch a movie. The best and most penetrating essays come in the second section, as Michaels gives a wincing account of family bedtime stories—on pogroms—a happier set of epiphanies on his father, a wise Yiddish-speaking barber; and yet another describing fish-out-of-water experiences at Berkeley. All told, these are soul-baring occasional pieces by a writer's writer and a master stylist. (July)
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Review

“An original; everything he wrote, like it or not, came alive. His prose moved at a fast clip . . . with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab.” —PHILLIP LOPATE, The Nation

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (June 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374148805
• ISBN-13: 978-0374148805
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,396,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What's in a word?, June 29, 2009

By 

DEREK DAVIS (CHICAGO, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Essays of Leonard Michaels (Hardcover)

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of reading The Collected Stories, so I was very interested to see how Michaels' prose work would compare with his fiction. I was not disappointed. Michaels writes with the passion and precision of a highly literate person who realizes the power of language and takes the world of ideas very seriously.

The essays assembled here, edited by his wife, Katharine Ogden Michaels and ranging over several decades of the author's career, are witty, erudite, and thought-provoking, touching on topics from art, literary, and film criticism to Heidegger, the cultural and personal significance of Yiddish, and Michaels' experiences writing the screenplay for the movie based on his novel, The Men's Club. Central to his personal and literary development was his Jewish upbringing in New York in the 1930s and '40s, and these autobiographical essays are some of his best. He also has some scathingly funny reminiscences of his years working in academia.

I have only two minor criticisms of this book. One is Michaels' seemingly uncritical acceptance of Jewish exceptionalism, and his failure to confront what this has meant in terms of world politics; he could hardly have been unaware of authors such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, for instance. Yet, given the time in which he grew up, and his family's personal experiences of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, this is forgivable. Politics, after all, was one topic Michaels didn't write much about. My other criticism has to do with what I see as the culturally conservative stance the author took in some of his later essays, bemoaning a loss of intellectual seriousness and the depreciation of solititude in contemporary culture. Now, I happen to agree with much of what Michaels says on these matters, but I believe some of his comments are too one-sided, and fail to grasp the inherent creative possiblities of modern life, instead harking back to some mythical Golden Age of 1950s intellectualism.

All in all, I found reading this collection a rewarding and inspiring experience.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure Enjoyment, May 17, 2010

By 

Bang Potential - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Essays of Leonard Michaels (Hardcover)

I found both Michaels's critical and personal essays completely enrapturing. Maybe it was his time period, his NYC, SF, U of Mich perspective, the fact that I'm the opposite of well read (I wrote down countless words and refs and had a blast wiki-ing them later), how easy he is to read, or some other quality I'll put my finger on later, but I thought this collection was amazing. I'd read a handful of his short stories as well as his "Sylvia" and "The Men's Club" novels (both short), and liked them, but something about the essays super clicked.

I bought a second copy through Amazon Marketplace and plan on foisting it on friend and foe alike. I'm aghast there aren't more reviews of this title.